Street of Thieves

Manna. The poorest survived thanks to tourism, the city survived thanks to tourism, it always wanted more, always attracted more, increased the number of hotels, of inns, of planes to bring these sheep to be fleeced, it all reminded me of Morocco, because at that period there was a promotional campaign for tourism in Marrakesh in the Barcelona subway, an assortment of orientalist photographs with a pretty slogan like “Marrakesh, the city that travels inside you,” or “Where your heart takes you,” and I said to myself that tourism was a curse, like gasoline, a trap, which brought false wealth, corruption and violence; in the Barcelona subway I thought again of the explosion in Marrakesh, of Sheikh Nureddin somewhere in Arabia, and of Bassam, somewhere in the Land of Darkness, of the attack in Tangier where that student had met death by sword — of course, Barcelona was different, it was a democracy, but you felt it was all at a tipping point, that it wouldn’t take much for the whole country to fall into violence and hatred as well, that France would follow, then Germany, and all of Europe would catch fire like the Arab world; the obscenity of this poster in the subway was proof of it, there was nothing else for Marrakesh to do than invest money in ad campaigns so that their lost manna would return, even if they knew perfectly well that it was the money from tourism that provoked underdevelopment, corruption and neo-colonialism, just as in Barcelona, little by little, you felt resentment against foreign cash mounting, cash from within as well as from without; money pitted the poor against each other, humiliation was slowly changing into hatred; everyone hated the Chinese, who were buying up the bars, restaurants, markets, one by one with the money of entire families who came from regions whose poverty couldn’t even be imagined; everyone despised the British louts who came to quench their thirst with cheap beer, fuck in doorways, and, still drunk, take a plane back that had cost them the price of a pint of ale in their obscure suburb; everyone silently desired those very young Nordic girls the color of chalk who, because of the difference in temperature, broke out their miniskirts and flip-flops in February — one quarter of Catalonia was out of work, the papers overflowed with terrifying stories about the crisis, about families kicked out of apartments they couldn’t pay for anymore, which the banks sold off cheaply while still continuing to claim their debt, about suicides, sacrifices, discouragement: you could feel the pressure mounting, violence mounting, even on the Street of Thieves among the poorest of the poor, even in Gràcia among the sons of the middle class, you could feel the city ready for anything, for resignation as well as for insurrection.

Mounir told me about Sidi Bouzid, about the gesture of despair that had set off the Revolution: you had to lift your hand against yourself to make the masses react, as if only that ultimate motion could finally set things off — someone had to burn himself to death for people to find the courage to act; it took the irreversible death of another to realize you had nothing to lose yourself. This question tormented me; it brought me back to Morocco, to my expedition at night with Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin, to my cowardliness, a movement exactly opposite that of Sidi Bouzid, as if on one hand there was suicide and on the other the dictatorship of cudgels, as if the whole world were on the point of toppling into the dictatorship of cudgels and as if all that was left was the prospect of setting yourself on fire — or staying on a balcony reading books, the ones that weren’t burned in the meantime, or going with Mounir to sell a camera to his fence, then drink a beer or two in a neighborhood bar, bowing low to the cops when you passed them.